Harold Blook: Why Freud Matters
[Mr. Bloom's most recent book is "Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine" (Riverhead, 2005).]
Sigmund Freud, one of the crucial authors and thinkers of the 20th century, was born in Moravia in 1856, and taken to Vienna as a child by his Jewish father and mother. Only a few professions were open to Jews in 19th-century Vienna, one of them being medicine. Freud consequently received a medical degree in 1881, and then wrote on hysteria. He would become the founder of modern psychoanalysis, among his many other achievements.
Freud died in England in 1939, after being ransomed from the Gestapo subsequent to the Nazi takeover in Austria. It is now exactly 150 years since his birth and two-thirds of a century since his death, and there is still no general agreement on the nature of his achievement. Yet 20th-century literature truly begins with Freud.
* * *
Freud was so prolific that any choice of his most significant books is somewhat arbitrary, but certainly they would include "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900), "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" (1901) and "Three Contributions to the Theology of Sexuality" (1905), in his earlier phase. As he developed and refined his theories, Freud composed a series of "cultural" studies including "Totem and Taboo" (1912), "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1930) and "Moses and Monotheism" (1939). Though these continue to be influential, they are not as vital as what seems to me his strongest works: "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920), "Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety" (1926), and the posthumously published, misleadingly titled "An Outline of Psychoanalysis" (1940).
Freud argued that psychoanalysis was a science, which in time would make a substantial contribution to biology. Almost no one now agrees with that hope, which was aptly dismissed by the brilliant Viennese Jewish satirist Karl Kraus, who observed that only the most fantastic elements in psychoanalysis were true. Even more memorably, Kraus wounded Freud by asserting that psychoanalysis was itself the disease of which it purported to be the cure.
Increasingly we have come to see that Freud has more in common with the moral essayist Michel de Montaigne than he does with the scientist Charles Darwin. To be, as Freud was, the Montaigne of the 20th century, was to be equal to the other major writers of that era: James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, just as Montaigne himself was the peer of Cervantes and of Shakespeare. I find the phrase, "the literary Freud," to be a redundancy, just as it would sound odd to speak of "the literary Joyce" or "the literary Proust."
Freud maps our minds by mapping his own, which was Montaigne's procedure. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who disliked both Freud and Shakespeare, sought to dismiss Freudian thought as "a powerful mythology," but that was accurate discernment, and not dismissal. Montaigne's art of telling the truth about the self is akin to Freud's artful mythology of the self, which he intended as truth. But is it? Yes and no, no and yes. Wittgenstein emphasized the "no" while nevertheless admiring Freud as a writer who had "something to say." One could change that to: "everything to say." Freud is interested in virtually everything, and teaches his reader very nearly all that can be taught....
Read entire article at WSJ
Sigmund Freud, one of the crucial authors and thinkers of the 20th century, was born in Moravia in 1856, and taken to Vienna as a child by his Jewish father and mother. Only a few professions were open to Jews in 19th-century Vienna, one of them being medicine. Freud consequently received a medical degree in 1881, and then wrote on hysteria. He would become the founder of modern psychoanalysis, among his many other achievements.
Freud died in England in 1939, after being ransomed from the Gestapo subsequent to the Nazi takeover in Austria. It is now exactly 150 years since his birth and two-thirds of a century since his death, and there is still no general agreement on the nature of his achievement. Yet 20th-century literature truly begins with Freud.
* * *
Freud was so prolific that any choice of his most significant books is somewhat arbitrary, but certainly they would include "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900), "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" (1901) and "Three Contributions to the Theology of Sexuality" (1905), in his earlier phase. As he developed and refined his theories, Freud composed a series of "cultural" studies including "Totem and Taboo" (1912), "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1930) and "Moses and Monotheism" (1939). Though these continue to be influential, they are not as vital as what seems to me his strongest works: "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920), "Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety" (1926), and the posthumously published, misleadingly titled "An Outline of Psychoanalysis" (1940).
Freud argued that psychoanalysis was a science, which in time would make a substantial contribution to biology. Almost no one now agrees with that hope, which was aptly dismissed by the brilliant Viennese Jewish satirist Karl Kraus, who observed that only the most fantastic elements in psychoanalysis were true. Even more memorably, Kraus wounded Freud by asserting that psychoanalysis was itself the disease of which it purported to be the cure.
Increasingly we have come to see that Freud has more in common with the moral essayist Michel de Montaigne than he does with the scientist Charles Darwin. To be, as Freud was, the Montaigne of the 20th century, was to be equal to the other major writers of that era: James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, just as Montaigne himself was the peer of Cervantes and of Shakespeare. I find the phrase, "the literary Freud," to be a redundancy, just as it would sound odd to speak of "the literary Joyce" or "the literary Proust."
Freud maps our minds by mapping his own, which was Montaigne's procedure. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who disliked both Freud and Shakespeare, sought to dismiss Freudian thought as "a powerful mythology," but that was accurate discernment, and not dismissal. Montaigne's art of telling the truth about the self is akin to Freud's artful mythology of the self, which he intended as truth. But is it? Yes and no, no and yes. Wittgenstein emphasized the "no" while nevertheless admiring Freud as a writer who had "something to say." One could change that to: "everything to say." Freud is interested in virtually everything, and teaches his reader very nearly all that can be taught....